The North Korean menace actor often called Lazarus Group has been attributed to the zero-day exploitation of a now-patched safety flaw in Google Chrome to grab management of contaminated units.
Cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky mentioned it found a novel assault chain in Could 2024 that focused the non-public laptop of an unnamed Russian nationwide with the Manuscrypt backdoor.
This entails triggering the zero-day exploit merely upon visiting a faux recreation web site (“detankzone[.]com”) that was geared toward people within the cryptocurrency sector. The marketing campaign is estimated to have commenced in February 2024.
“On the floor, this web site resembled a professionally designed product web page for a decentralized finance (DeFi) NFT-based (non-fungible token) multiplayer on-line battle enviornment (MOBA) tank recreation, inviting customers to obtain a trial model,” Kaspersky researchers Boris Larin and Vasily Berdnikov mentioned.
“However that was only a disguise. Below the hood, this web site had a hidden script that ran within the consumer’s Google Chrome browser, launching a zero-day exploit and giving the attackers full management over the sufferer’s PC.”
The vulnerability in query is CVE-2024-4947, a sort confusion bug within the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine that Google patched in mid-Could 2024.
The usage of a malicious tank recreation (DeTankWar, DeFiTankWar, DeTankZone, or TankWarsZone) as a conduit to ship malware is a tactic that Microsoft has attributed to a different North Korean menace exercise cluster dubbed Moonstone Sleet.
These assaults are carried out by approaching potential targets by way of e-mail or messaging platforms, tricking them into putting in the sport by posing as a blockchain firm or a recreation developer in search of funding alternatives.
Kaspersky’s newest findings add one other piece to the assault puzzle, highlighting the position performed by the zero-day browser exploit within the marketing campaign.
Particularly, the exploit comprises code for 2 vulnerabilities: the primary is used to provide attackers learn and write entry to the whole tackle area of the Chrome course of from the JavaScript (CVE-2024-4947), and the second is abused to get across the V8 sandbox.
“The [second] vulnerability is that the digital machine has a hard and fast variety of registers and a devoted array for storing them, however the register indexes are decoded from the instruction our bodies and aren’t checked,” the researchers defined. “This permits attackers to entry the reminiscence exterior the bounds of the register array.”
The V8 sandbox bypass was patched by Google in March 2024 following a bug report that was submitted on March 20, 2024. That mentioned, it is at the moment not identified if the attackers found it earlier and weaponized it as a zero-day, or if it was exploited as an N-day vulnerability.
Profitable exploitation is adopted by the menace actor working a validator that takes the type of a shellcode answerable for gathering system info, which is then used to find out if the machine is effective sufficient to conduct additional post-exploitation actions. The precise payload delivered after this stage is at the moment unknown.
“What by no means ceases to impress us is how a lot effort Lazarus APT places into their social engineering campaigns,” the Russian firm mentioned, mentioning the menace actor’s sample of contacting influential figures within the cryptocurrency area to assist them promote their malicious web site.
“For a number of months, the attackers have been constructing their social media presence, frequently making posts on X (previously Twitter) from a number of accounts and selling their recreation with content material produced by generative AI and graphic designers.”
The attacker’s exercise has been noticed throughout X and LinkedIn, to not point out leveraging specially-crafted web sites and spear-phishing methods to infiltrate targets of curiosity.
The web site can also be designed to lure guests into downloading a ZIP archive (“detankzone.zip”) that, as soon as launched, is a completely practical downloadable recreation that requires participant registration, but additionally harbors code to launch a customized loader codenamed YouieLoad, as beforehand detailed by Microsoft.
What’s extra, it is believed that the Lazarus Group stole the supply code for the sport from a official blockchain play-to-earn (P2E) recreation named DeFiTankLand (DFTL), which suffered a hack of its personal in March 2024, resulting in the theft of $20,000 price of DFTL2 cash.
Though the mission builders blamed an insider for the breach, Kaspersky suspects that the Lazarus Group was behind it, and that they stole the sport’s supply code alongside the DFTL2 cash and repurposed it to advance their objectives.
“Lazarus is among the most energetic and complicated APT actors, and monetary achieve stays one in every of their prime motivations,” the researchers mentioned.
“The attackers’ ways are evolving they usually’re always developing with new, advanced social engineering schemes. Lazarus has already efficiently began utilizing generative AI, and we predict that they are going to give you much more elaborate assaults utilizing it.”
